AMD Contest: What Would You Do With 48 Cores?

Games face bottlenecks from heavy statefulness. Animations, physics, and AI have design-required interdependencies where a change in one will trigger a change in the other - e.g., the player character throws a box, it collides with an enemy, and the box breaks, while the enemy shows a visible hitreact or knockback, and possibly changes their future tactics. Sometimes you can queue and defer all of these changes for a frame and lose some responsiveness, but other times it's really critical to have them all sync up.

The render stage of graphics benefits from massive parallelization, but most subsystems can't see the same improvement. A common fallacy of new game programmers is to think that "one thread per actor" is a clean architecture - only to discover that each actor's thread blocks the others and causes massive slowdown.

Well, it depends how you view the original question.

Sure, you could eventually find some purpose to the 48 cores, but that implies an active search for such a purpose and basically a side-project. I dunno, I might just collocate the server and sub-rent virtual machines or do some shared hosting -- but that's not what I care about.

So -- for my current tools and work-flow, 48 cores isn't needed. Pretty sure some scientist or video editor might replace his cluster with this thing but as a normal user and developer I would severely under-utilize the hardware.

Our pattern-matching-based search heuristics are great because the human mind is amazing.

At least that's how I see it ;)

I've been running nightly's lately and it does indeed "isolate evil". Instead of a browser crash I now see a message at the top of the respective page telling me that the plugin crashed.